linux/kernel/printk
Linus Torvalds 5c2992ee7f printk: remove console flushing special cases for partial buffered lines
It actively hurts proper merging, and makes for a lot of special cases.
There was a good(ish) reason for doing it originally, but it's getting
too painful to maintain.  And most of the original reasons for it are
long gone.

So instead of having special code to flush partial lines to the console
(as opposed to the record buffers), do _all_ the console writing from
the record buffer, and be done with it.

If an oops happens (or some other synchronous event), we will flush the
partial lines due to the oops printing activity, so this does not affect
that.  It does mean that if you have a completely hung machine, a
partial preceding line may not have been printed out.

That was some of the original reason for this complexity, in fact, back
when we used to test for the historical i386 "halt" instruction problem
by doing

	pr_info("Checking 'hlt' instruction... ");

	if (!boot_cpu_data.hlt_works_ok) {
		pr_cont("disabled\n");
		return;
	}
	halt();
	halt();
	halt();
	halt();
	pr_cont("OK\n");

and that model no longer works (it the 'hlt' instruction kills the
machine, the partial line won't have been flushed, so you won't even see
it).

Of course, that was also back in the days when people actually had
textual console output rather than a graphical splash-screen at bootup.
How times change..

Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky.work@gmail.com>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Tested-by: Petr Mladek <pmladek@suse.com>
Tested-by: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
Tested-by: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2016-12-14 21:08:18 -08:00
..
braille.c printk: fix parsing of "brl=" option 2016-08-26 17:39:35 -07:00
braille.h printk: move braille console support into separate braille.[ch] files 2013-07-31 14:41:03 -07:00
console_cmdline.h console: Fix console name size mismatch 2015-03-07 03:39:55 +01:00
internal.h Revert "printk: create pr_<level> functions" 2016-08-09 10:48:18 -07:00
Makefile printk/nmi: generic solution for safe printk in NMI 2016-05-20 17:58:30 -07:00
nmi.c printk/NMI: handle continuous lines and missing newline 2016-12-12 18:55:09 -08:00
printk.c printk: remove console flushing special cases for partial buffered lines 2016-12-14 21:08:18 -08:00